As crazy as the snacilbupeR race is, it’s not, really. If you replaced all their names with letters – candidate A, candidate B etc – any rational observer would say that, based on the trends and the polls, candidate A with 316 delegates is well on his way to becoming the party nominee for President.

Except, nobody in the Party LIKES candidate A. Also, nobody likes candidate B very much, the only other guy who has won a few. Candidate C, who won Minnesota in the middle of last night, everyone likes simply by virtue of that fact that’s he’s not B, and most emphatically not A. He’s also not the most adroit politician to ever execute an aqualunge, but candidates D and E are less adroit still.

So what this leaves us is Trump, with one quarter of the votes needed to win the nomination, being treated as a pariah by the very party for whom he is their standard bearer. As party leaders try to find an alley door to shove him out of, all his voters just keep voting for him. BUT: they rarely raise him above 40% in a race, and he racked up all those Super Tuesday wins while still failing to achieve a majority in a single race. No Republican has, yet, in 2016, and that’s a record.

Never in the history of Republican Primaries have we gone through Super Tuesday without several – sometimes many – state races won with a majority of votes. They number in the dozens going back through 1984, when Super Tuesday was invented, and continue back through early primaries in the 1970s, when the modern primary system came to be. Two candidates, 3 candidates, 4 candidates, even 5 valid candidates gaining votes early on in races such as this, have always produced winners – sometimes several – who broke the 50% mark.

Here are the number of Republican contested primaries (or caucuses) won with >50% of the vote, by year, thru Super Tuesday of each contest:

Note: 1984 and 2004 were left out because they were virtually uncontested incumbents.

So while, on the one hand, it may appear that Republicans are denying Trump true front-runner status, on the other hand, there’s never been a front-runner who deserved it less.

~Primo